Column One: Obama and the ‘official truth’

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since
his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in
California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted,
the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than
a court hearing.

But in Nakoula’s case, it led to a year in a federal
penitentiary. Because he wasn’t really arrested for violating the terms of his
parole.

Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the
Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US
Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and
three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely
blamed Nakoula’s film – and scapegoated Nakoula – for inciting the al-Qaida
attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the
actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which
took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.

With the
flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is
a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS’s prejudicial treatment
of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental
Protection Agency’s prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the
Justice Department’s subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters
and editors from the Associated Press.

On the surface, they seem like
unrelated events.

But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the
Obama administration: To establish an “official truth” about all issues and
events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who
question or expose the fraudulence of that “official truth.”

From the
outset of Obama’s tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his
strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood
and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military,
and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of
Yemen.

The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It
presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement
of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration
claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to
al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.

Just as important, it
has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the
administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam
from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject
ban.

It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information
relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi
cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying
the truth. But it is far from a unique occurrence.

For instance, the
administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan’s massacre of
his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the
months preceding the Tsarnaev brother’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in
its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about
the older brother’s jihadist activities with local law enforcement
agencies.

To advance its “official truth,” the administration leaked
information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official
narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the
Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran’s nuclear
weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence
operations. But they advanced the administration’s foreign policy
narrative.

Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went
on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the
administration’s narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP
reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US
airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama’s claim that al-Qaida was
defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama’s support for the al-Qaida-aligned
antiregime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in
November 2011.

Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by
demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that
policy into question.

For example, in his satirical speech at the White
House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely – and libelously – accused
Rep.

Michele Bachmann of “book burning.”

Bachmann is an outspoken
critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America’s
allies.

Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative’s
Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as
the administration’s tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents.
This practice arguably began during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign when
then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as “bitter” souls who “cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren’t like them.”

In the
lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media
characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as
racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.

And now we have learned that
beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only
be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups
dedicated to fighting Obama’s domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information
about the groups’ donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking
accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had
no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of
nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement.
Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power.

We also
learned this week that the IRS leaked information about donors to at least one
nonprofit group that opposes homosexual marriage to a group that supports
homosexual marriage. The latter group was led by one of Obama’s reelection
campaign’s co-chairman. We learned that the IRS audited a university professor
who wrote newspaper articles critical of fake Catholic groups that supported
Obama’s pro-abortion policies.

All of this aligns seamlessly with the
Obama administration’s demonization of conservative donors like the Koch
brothers, and other stories of persecution of conservative donors that have come
out over the past several years.

Last July, The Wall Street Journal’s Kim
Strassel reported that after the Obama campaign besmirched as “less-thank
reputable” eight businessmen who supported political action committees
associated with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, one of the donors, Frank
VanderSloot, found himself subjected to an IRS audit and a Labor Department
investigation.

Finally there is the administration’s discriminatory
treatment of pro-Israel organizations.

A day after Lois Lerner, the head
of the IRS department overseeing nonprofit groups, admitted the IRS had been
discriminating against groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, we were
reminded of the appalling treatment that Z Street, a new pro-Israel organization
that opposes Obama’s policy toward Israel, received at the hands of the
IRS.

Z Street was founded in 2009 and applied for nonprofit status in
December 2009. In 2010, Z Street filed a lawsuit in federal court against the
IRS. According to court documents, the suit was filed after Z Street was
informed by an IRS spokesperson that consideration of its application was being
delayed, and could be denied because the IRS has a special policy for dealing
with nonprofit applications submitted by groups related to
Israel.

According to Z Street’s court filings, the IRS official said that
all Israel-related organizations are assigned to “a special unit in the DC
office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the
administration’s public policies.”

Around the same time that Z Street’s
application for nonprofit status hit a brick wall of discriminatory treatment,
Commentary magazine, also a nonprofit organization, received a letter from the
IRS threatening to revoke its nonprofit status because in 2008 the publication
posted the transcript of a speech then Sen. Joseph Lieberman gave at a
Commentary dinner in which he endorsed Sen.

John McCain for
president.

As John Podhoretz, Commentary’s editor, wrote last week, to
disprove a false charge, the magazine had to spend tens of thousands of dollars
and waste “dozens upon dozens” of work hours copying two million pages of
articles posted on the magazine’s website in 2008 to prove that Lieberman’s
speech was a tiny fraction of the magazine’s overall output.

Then, too,
the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit where I work as the director of
the Israel Security Project, was recently subjected to an IRS audit – which it
also passed with flying colors.

The Freedom Center’s work spans the
spectrum from domestic policy to foreign policy, and like Z Street and
Commentary, is generally critical of the Obama administration’s policy toward
Israel.

Finally, there is the administration’s obsessive targeting of
billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson. During the 2012 presidential election,
Obama’s top political adviser David Axelrod wrote a letter to Antonio Miguel, a
Socialist member of the Spanish parliament, attacking Adelson as
“greedy.”

Miguel leaked the letter to the media while Adelson was in
Spain promoting his Las Vegas Sands casino corporation’s plans to build
Eurovegas, a casino in Madrid. Axelrod later sent his letter to Obama supporters
in an email from the Obama presidential campaign.

Adelson is best known
for his support for the US-Israel alliance, and his friendship with Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. By calling Adelson “greedy,” Axelrod was channeling
age-old anti- Semitic imagery, and by inference engaging in it, in his assault
against Adelson. In the letter in question, Adelson was the subject of this ad
hominem assault due to his support for Romney in the 2012 elections.

The
Tea Party movement has to date limited its scope to domestic policy –
challenging the growth of the federal government on a host of issues. For its
part, still smarting from the unpopularity of former president George W. Bush’s
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Republican Party has yet to enunciate a
clear foreign policy.

The closest thing to a systematic rebuke of the
Obama administration’s signature foreign policy of courting Islamist movements
and regimes and treating US allies in the region with hostility are
organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Z Street and Commentary
and wealthy donors like Adelson. Their stalwart and articulate support for a
strong US alliance with Israel, and a strong and vibrant Israel, are the only
coherent challenge to Obama’s pro-Islamist foreign policy.

By targeting
them, the Obama administration completes the circle of an overall modus operandi
of punishing those who oppose and expose the failures of his policies – domestic
and foreign. The underlying theme that connects Benghazi to the Tea Party, to
the subpoenaing of AP phone records, to Z Street, to Nakoula is that they all
have challenged the administration’s “official truth.”

One can only hope
that Obama’s thuggish creation and corrupt defense of his “official truth” will
anger, disgust – and frighten – all Americans.